THE rIGHT IS NOT CONSERVATIVE:

I reached out to French because he grasps what's really driving the cultural right at this moment and why the tendencies it is unleashing are cause for profound concern. An edited and condensed version of our exchange follows.

Greg Sargent: In recent days you've strongly dissented from some current obsessions on the right. You're deeply skeptical of laws limiting classroom discussion of race, sexual orientation and gender identity. You've attacked DeSantis's use of state power to punish Disney for expressing its views on one such law.

What is it that you see as alarming in this as an overall trend?

David French: Look back at the last 20 years of the conservative legal movement, and you'll see a host of lawsuits brought against speech codes on campuses. You'll see a long-term effort to vindicate the free speech rights of private corporations. You had a long-running effort to protect the free speech and free exercise rights of public school teachers.

In about a 12-month span, you've seen a dramatic reversal. You see an increasing effort on the part of red-state legislators to adopt speech codes, most applying to K-through-12 schools. You have seen an effort to regulate the speech of private corporations.

What you're beginning to see is a broader embrace of state power to punish enemies and reward friends.

The root of it is a kind of cultural panic, a thought that conservative political views, religious views and cultural views are in retreat everywhere. That the culture wars are irretrievably lost. That all that's left to the right is the exercise of raw political power.

Sargent: You are rare among conservatives in this sense: Unlike those who constantly bewail the supposed hegemony of liberal cultural power, you are willing to say that conservatism itself retains a great deal of cultural power.

French: What do cultural conservatives care about? They'll say they want intact families, less teen sex and teen pregnancy, less divorce, less abortion, more kids being raised in two-parent families.

On every one of those fronts, I say, "Good news!" Divorce has been decreasing. The percentage of kids being raised with their parents is increasing. The abortion rate is lower. If you look at these markers of cultural health, time and again you'll see they're actually improving.

That is not to say that society is as healthy as anybody wants it to be. But to hear the cultural right talk about the United States of America, it's been a march to chaos. The opposite is true.

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